What's So Funny About Baseball In Buffalo?

Warner Hessler

April 09, 1991|By WARNER HESSLER Staff Writer

Funny guy, that Brian Schmitz. The columnist for the Orlando Sentinel knows that the National League included Orlando as one of six finalists for an expansion team because major league baseball has a sense of humor.

He likes his city, knows a lot of people who actually live there, and knows that not everybody there wears mouse ears. But he doesn't take this expansion business too serious, and he said so recently in a guest column in the Washington Post.

Unfortunately, his tongue-in-cheek column supporting Orlando was surrounded by columns from writers representing the other five finalist cities who did take it seriously.

The Post asked a writer from each of the six cities to present his community's case, and some of the brothers said the darndest things.

Tom ``Welcome to Tampa, spend money, but don't forget to leave'' McEwen of the Tampa Tribune talked about the new Florida Suncoast Dome in St. Petersburg, how the area is ``steeped and dripping in baseball tradition,'' and said ``the area has earned'' an expansion team.

Doesn't McEwen realize that Tampa-St. Pete is the only community in Florida that has lousy baseball weather? A dome in Florida? Give me a break. Toronto, maybe, but not Florida. Think of what that does to the sunglasses and mosquito repellent business.

And what's this about baseball tradition? Does he know that only one native-born Floridian is in the baseball Hall of Fame? Utah, that other great baseball hotbed, has one, too. As for having earned a team, how? By drawing a couple thousand fans to Class A Florida State League games?

As for this vaunted Tampa-St. Pete growth, well, the Shuffleboard Hall of Fame is there, but 28 percent of Tampa's downtown offices were empty in January, and St. Pete's major downtown project in the last two years was a six-level, $13-million stucco parking garage.

Miami is surrounded by swamps, alligators and the Atlantic Ocean, but that didn't stop Bob Rubin of the Miami Herald from building an imaginary bridge to potential customers for the Miami Panthers.

``And to the south lies baseball-mad Latin America,'' he wrote. ``An entire continent could adopt the Panthers.''

Can you just picture thousands of Latin Americans waking up early, hopping in their boats, crossing the ocean to Miami, parking at a marina and taking a cab to the stadium? You can't?

Irv Moss of the Denver Post didn't let geography prevent him from opening the season ticket market to fans in Montana and New Mexico.

``Denver would be in the middle of more than five million potential fans within an hour's plane ride,'' he wrote.

Can you imagine thousands of fans in Montana and New Mexico buying a $200 round-trip airline ticket to watch a baseball game? You can't?

The legendary Shirley Povich, who has written about sports since 1922 for the Washington Post, presented his city's case by citing numbers related to population (3,192,582) and average household income ($62,000). Impressive numbers indeed, but he left out ``two'' - the number of baseball teams that have left Washington because of poor attendance.

Bob DiCesare of the Buffalo News had perhaps the strongest case, a case based on baseball facts. Buffalo, which attracted more than one million fans to see its AAA team in each of the last three years, regularly outdraws such major league teams as Cleveland, Houston, Atlanta and Texas.

But the numbers DiCesare forgot to mention were those dealing with declining population. In 1952, for example, Buffalo's was larger than Dallas.

Funny guy, that Schmitz. By not taking expansion seriously, though, at least he doesn't present a case based on false premises. Maybe Orlando should get a team.

And let's give one to Buffalo, too. It doesn't have the Suncoast Dome, but it does have baseball fans. Let the other cities work on their geography and math.